Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Drug identification and interaction checker based on IoT to minimize adverse drug reactions and improve drug compliance

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Drug compliance and adverse drug reactions (ADR) are two of the most important issues regarding patient safety throughout the worldwide healthcare sector. ADR prevalence is 6.7 % throughout hospitals worldwide, with an international death rate of 0.32 % of the total of the patients. This rate is even higher in Ambient Assisted Living environments, where 15 % of the patients suffer clinically significant interactions due to patient non-compliance to drug dosage and schedule of intake in addition to suffering from polypharmacy. These instances increase with age and cause risks of drug interactions, adverse effects, and toxicity. However, with a tight follow-up of the drug treatment, complications of incorrect drug use can be reduced. For that purpose, we propose an innovative system based on the Internet of Things (IoT) for the drug identification and the monitoring of medication. IoT is applied to examine drugs in order to fulfill treatment, to detect harmful side effects of pharmaceutical excipients, allergies, liver/renal contradictions, and harmful side effects during pregnancy. The IoT design acknowledges that the aforementioned problems are worldwide so the solution supports several IoT identification technologies: barcode, Radio Frequency Identification, Near Field Communication, and a new solution developed for low-income countries based on IrDA in collaboration with the World Health Organization. These technologies are integrated in personal devices such as smart-phones, PDAs, PCs, and in our IoT-based personal healthcare device called Movital.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Drug database from PortalFarma Association, https://botplusweb.portalfarma.com.

  2. World Health Organization, Stop TB Department, http://www.who.int/tb/about/raviglione_biodata/en/index.html.

  3. Example for the Myambutol from PortalFarma: https://botplusweb.portalfarma.com/botplus.asp?accion=FICHA&verDatosGenerales.x=1&clascodigo=01-97826.

  4. RFID Touchtag reference cost: http://www.touchatag.com/e-store.

  5. RFID UPM RAFLATAC reference cost: http://www.rfidsupplychain.com/-strse-275/UPM-Raflatac-HF-RaceTrack/Detail.bok?name=upm+rfid.

  6. RFID MiFare Desfire reference cost: http://www.akrocard.com.

  7. ICIUM conference (celebrated every 7 years): http://www.inrud.org/ICIUM/ICIUM-2011.cfm.

References

  1. Linjakumpu T, Hartikainen S, Klaukka T, Veijola J, Kivela S-K, Isoaho R (2002) Use of medications and polypharmacy are increasing among the elderly. J Clin Epidemiol 55(8):809–817

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Bates DW, Cullen DJ, Laird N, Petersen LA (1995) Incidence of adverse drug events and potential adverse drug events. Implications for prevention ADE prevention study group. J Am Med Assoc 274(1):29–34

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Classen DC, Pestotnik SL, Evans RS, Lloyd JF, Burke JP (1997) Adverse drug events in hospitalized patients: excess length of stay, extra costs, and attributable mortality. J Am Med Assoc 277(4):22–29

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Pirmohamed M, James S, Meakin S, Green C, Scott AK, Walley TJ, Farrar K, Park K, Breckenridge A (2004) Adverse drug reactions as cause of admission to hospital: prospective analysis of 18 820 patients. BMJ 329(7456):15–19

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Barat I, Andreasen F, Damsgaard EMS (2000) The consumption of drugs by 75-year-old individuals living in their own homes. Eur J Clin Pharmacol 56:501–509

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Javadi MR, Shalviri G, Gholami K, Salamzadeh J, Maghooli G, Mirsaeedi SM (2007) Adverse reactions of anti-tuberculosis drugs in hospitalized patients: incidence, severity and risk factors. Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety, vol 16, no. 10. Wiley, London, pp 1104–1110

    Google Scholar 

  7. Ammenwerth E, Schnell-Inderst P, Machan C, Siebert U (2008) The effect of electronic prescribing on medication errors and adverse drug events: a systematic review. J Am Med Inf Assoc 15(5):585-600, ISSN 1067-5027

    Google Scholar 

  8. Atzori L, Iera A, Morabito G (2010) The internet of things: a survey. Comput Netw 54(15):2787–2805

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Istepanian RSH, Jara A, Sungoor A, Philips N (2010) Internet of Things for M-health Applications (IoMT), AMA-IEEE medical technology conference on individualized healthcare, Washington

  10. Jara AJ, Zamora MA, Skarmeta AFG (2011) An internet of things based personal device for diabetes therapy management in ambient assisted living (AAL). Pers Ubiquit Comput 15(4):431–440. doi:10.1007/s00779-010-0353-1

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Hui J, Thubert P (2011) Compression format for IPv6 datagrams over IEEE 802.15.4-based networks, RFC 6282. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), ISSN: 1721–2070

  12. Eyeforpharma (2011) Applicability of NFC in pharmacy sector, http://social.eyeforpharma.com/story/future-pharma-what-near-field-communication-nfc-means-pharma

  13. Jara AJ, Alcolea AF, Zamora M, Skarmeta AFG (2010) Analysis of different techniques to define metadata structure in NFC/RFID cards to reduce access latency, optimize capacity, and guarantee integrity, 10th IFAC workshop on intelligent manufacturing systems, Lisbon

  14. Yamamoto M, Onaka T et al (1998) Development and utilization of a drug information system in the Japanese pharmaceutical industry. Inform Health Soc Care 23:31–41

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Poon EG, Keohane CA, Yoon CS et al (2010) Effect of bar-code technology on the safety of medication administration. N Engl J Med 362(18):1698–1707

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Bassen H, Seidman S, Rogul J, Desta AB, Wolfgang S (2007) An exposure system for evaluating possible effects of RFID on various formulations of drug products, communications magazine. IEEE 45(4):17–23

    Google Scholar 

  17. Lahtela A, Hassinen M, Jylha V (2008) RFID and NFC in healthcare: safety of hospitals medication care, pervasive computing technologies for healthcare, pervasive health, pp 241–244

  18. Jara AJ, Alcolea AF, Zamora MA, Skarmeta AFG, Alsaedy M (2010) Drugs interaction checker based on IoT. IEEE internet of things conference (IoT 2010), Tokyo, pp 1–8

  19. Barclay E (2009) Text messages could hasten tuberculosis drug compliance. The Lancet 373(Is. 9657):15–16. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(08)61938-8

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Microchip (2010) PIC12F609/HV609, PIC12F615/HV615, PIC12F617 8-Pin Flash-Based 8-Bit CMOS MCU, http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/41302D.pdf

  21. RAFSEC (2011) UPM rafsec product offering for the pharmaceutical industry, http://www.imagineps.com/images/RFID/Raflatac/Gen13-56ItemlevelandpharmaceuticalInlays.pdf. Last time accessed 30/09/2011

  22. OMRON (2011) Tag Inlays Solution, http://www.ucis.co.kr/product_file/1356tag.pdf. Last time accessed 30/09/2011

  23. Shelby Z (2011) CoRE Link Format, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Work in progress (draft-07), http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/draft-ietf-core-link-format-07.pdf

Download references

Acknowledgments

This research has been conducted by the Intelligent Systems and Networks group of the University of Murcia, Espinardo, Spain. This research group has been awarded for its excellence as a research group in the frames of the Spanish “Plan de Ciencia y Tecnología de la Región de Murcia” from the “Fundación Séneca” (04552/GERM/06). The authors would like to thank the European Project “Universal Integration of the Internet of Things through an IPv6-based Service Oriented Architecture enabling heterogeneous components interoperability (IoT6)” from the FP7 with the grant agreement no: 288445, the Spanish ministry for Industry, Tourism and infrastructure, and the ministry for education, social politics and sport for sponsoring the research activities under the grants “Intelligent Beds for Clinical Environments” (TSI-020302-2009-89), “Architecture for Intelligent Respiratory Evaluation (AIRE)” (TSI-020302-2010-95), and FPU program (AP2009-3981). Finally, a special thanks to all of the volunteers nurses and physicians who assisted in the evaluation of this project: Fermín Alcolea, José Javier Campuzano, María Jesús Carrillo. And last but not least, thank you to Madeleine de Rosas-Valera, MD (Technical Officer in Patient Safety from the World Health Organization), to the pharmacology specialist Mona Alsaedy from United Kingdom, and to the pharmaceutical technician Consuelo Olmos from Spain.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Clinical Technology Lab, Computer Science Fac, University of Murcia,  Murcia, Spain

    Antonio J. Jara, Miguel A. Zamora & Antonio F. Skarmeta

Authors
  1. Antonio J. Jara
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Miguel A. Zamora
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Antonio F. Skarmeta
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Antonio J. Jara.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Jara, A.J., Zamora, M.A. & Skarmeta, A.F. Drug identification and interaction checker based on IoT to minimize adverse drug reactions and improve drug compliance. Pers Ubiquit Comput 18, 5–17 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-012-0622-2

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-012-0622-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation